Lieutenant-Governor Najeeb Jung on Friday said residents of Delhi may continue to face planned blackouts in the coming week.

He said the repairs on the power infrastructure, which was damaged in the thurnderstorm last week, were bound to take more time. “Before the storm struck, we were generating about 5,000 MW of electricity, which was reduced to 1,000 MW (due to the storm). You can imagine what we went through, worried that the entire city will be plunged into darkness. We are now producing 4,600-4,700MW. The problem is that some big towers and lines fell in the storm and repairing them will take some time. Due to rising temperature, the demand for power has shot up to 6,000MW, which we cannot meet. So, there could be blackouts for another three to four days to cope with the crisis,” Jung said.

Meanwhile, Tata-backed power distribution company, TPDDL, accused the Delhi government of “inefficiency”. In a letter to Power secretary Arun Goyal on Friday, TPDDL CEO Praveer Sinha said the power situation after the storm on May 30 would have been handled without any load shedding and disturbance “if the commissioning of 220 KV Wazirpur grid with incoming power from the 400 KVMundka substation had been completed on time”.

Drawing a list of eight pending projects to deal with “capacity constraints, reliability, contingencies and to augment load supply” Sinha said it is “unfortunate that none of the projects cited critical have been completed so far”. “This is very critical to meet Delhi’s transmission requirement,” the letter said.

At 12.45 pm on Friday, Delhi Transco Limited’s (DTL) Bawana 400 KV to Bawana DSIDC 220 KV Circuit-1 tripped. This, officials said, resulted in load restriction on the other circuit, due to which the TPDDL had to carry out rotational load shedding in Narela, Sarup Nagar, Jahangirpuri, Ashok Vihar and Tri Nagar areas.

“In such a critical scenario, the State Load Despatch Centre (SLDC) is not allowing TPDDL to transfer the load to alternate Gopalpur 220 KV owing to overloading of 400 KV Mandola Grid. Due to the tripping of DTL circuits, TPDDL’s 300 MW load was affected. The DTL, a Delhi government company responsible for transmission of power to Delhi discoms, has once again — for the second time in eight days — failed to meet the power requirement of Delhi during this peak summer,” a TPDDL spokesperson said.